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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Well this Blog looked different to what it is now - no mention of going to the UK by sea before. This below is why!

After our disappointment of having to cancel our long planned Spring holiday in the UK because of the Icelandic volcano, we started to think what we could do instead. Barry looked for a "short" cruise out of Brisbane, just to cheer us up - and came up with a much longer one. A total of 82 days at sea - on the P&O Oriana from Brisbane to Southampton via the Suez canal and 10 ports in Asia and Europe. You can see the route here. We then have 19 days in the UK (over Christmas) , before returning to Brisbane on P&O Arcadia via the Panama canal and 10 ports in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii, and Pacific Islands. This cruise you can see here

There are a number of ways of doing a "World Cruise". Many of them are longer than this trip and stop at more ports. I think this one is more reminiscent of the P&O transits from the UK to Australia and back, when international flying was less common. How the wheel has turned. Years ago, the cheapest way was by sea - now it is by air!! This trip has a number of things going for us. Firstly it allows us to spend Christmas in London. Lets us see England over winter (which Christine has not seen, except for one day in London in December 1997 when we were waiting to fly home). Of course, we get to go on two different cruiseships - that will be interesting. We transit both major canals of the world - the Suez and the Panama - and we have a glimpse of many places that we had previously thought we would never get to - places like the Azores, Caribbean, etc.

We have paid our deposit - and now wait to pay the final balance in a couple of months. But we don't know how we are going to last out the wait until 6 November, after waiting almost 6 months for the last journey which never eventuated.